


Transangelic Exodus

by spacecuppa (EmmaLikesTheInternet)



Category: The Magnus Archives (Podcast)
Genre: Alternate Universe - Fantasy, Angels, Angst, Catholicism, Character Study, Established Relationship, Fluff, Freedom, Government Gone Evil, Happy Ending, Hurt/Comfort, Identity Issues, Love Conquers All, M/M, On the Run, Religious Imagery & Symbolism, Roadtrip, Romance, Social Commentary, Urban Fantasy, Waxing Poetic About Your Boyfriend 20 Hour Edition, angel! Jon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-08-29
Updated: 2020-08-29
Packaged: 2021-03-06 16:21:01
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 14,194
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/26181811
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/EmmaLikesTheInternet/pseuds/spacecuppa
Summary: One day, Jonathan Sims grows a pair of angel wings, and the faceless man who lives in every street takes him away in the dead of the night.They are calling it a Transangelic Epidemic: the sudden and monstrous transformation of hundreds of good citizens. They are saying it needs to be controlled.Martin Blackwood doesn’t have angel wings, but he does have a stolen car and a determination to set the man he loves free. And so begins an impossible roadtrip; an angel and his lover, driving away from the faceless forces that mean them harm.Together, they might just be strong enough to make it.
Relationships: Martin Blackwood/Jonathan "Jon" Sims | The Archivist
Comments: 32
Kudos: 111
Collections: Rusty Quill Big Bang 2020





	Transangelic Exodus

**Author's Note:**

> Tada! Finally, Here is my fic for the Rusty Quill Big Bang 2020. Massive thank you to the organisers of this year's big bang for making this possible, and going the extra mile to provide support and encouragement. An extra thank you to lapinoutt for being an INCREDIBLE beta reader and supporter of the process!!
> 
> CHECK OUT THE AMAZING ART!!!!!!!!! the artist I had the pleasure of collaborating with can be found on twitter [@blueskiddoodle](https://twitter.com/blueskiddoodle?s=20) and tumblr [@divineatrophy](https://divineatrophy.tumblr.com). Go and check those socials out and be sure to send some love-- isnt the piece just gorgeous?? I can't stop LOOKING.
> 
> The title of this fic comes from Transangelic Exodus, the album by Ezra Furman which inspired the concept for this fic. It is my favourite album in the world; it's beautiful and so important to me and you should definetely check it out. If you have superpowers and can read and listen to music simultaneously (i'm jealous) then I can't recommend enough.
> 
> CONTENT WARNINGS  
> This fic uses a fantasy context to explore the persecution of a minority by a powerful authority. It may remind people of the systemic racism, transphobia and homophobia that occours in certain governments. While there is minimal graphic content, and it is framed to criticise authority, the allusions to real world issues may be triggering or upsetting to some. Additionally, its briefly implied that a character isunconsetually drugged in a hospital setting. Please be mindful and stay safe.
> 
> Enjoy!

The distance between you and the one you love is never much. Not miles, at any rate. The first person to quantify distance only made up numbers against their own perceptions. So, the outside world is nothing but a subjective experience; and distance is only effort, only inertia you are yet to overcome.

Martin is a mile away from the one he loves, and really, that is no different to one thousand miles. Because physical distance, the number of road signs, petrol stations, is no object. Martin was always going to close that distance. It takes him no effort; it is what he always meant to do. The fact that they will embrace again is an inevitability.

And that road stretching in front of him is terrifying, because the truth at the end of it has to be faced, and so Martin drives, scared beyond words. He used to think that evil was the stuff of comic books and the world was coloured in shades of grey. But it doesn’t look like that anymore. What those people did to Jon—

He doesn’t actually _know_ , which is somehow worse; he just woke up one day and the space beside him was empty.

And in that blank space, more terrible images grow of pain inflicted and pain endured. He imagines the transformation, sometimes, the horrible affliction described on the third page of the newspapers which Martin keeps under the passenger seat.

It is dangerous, They say. Stay indoors, They say, or you might be next.

Perhaps it starts when you stretch your arms one day and hear a rip. And then the hollow between your shoulder blades starts to bleed, and it does not stop bleeding, and the pain…

The day Jon stopped answering his calls…somehow, not knowing is worse. He can almost hear his voice, crying across the length of all those roads.

No, They could not even be called people, they were the real monsters, and why couldn’t anybody else see it? Why the fuck was everyone else on their side?

Was this it? Him in the car, Jon somewhere else, the only two in the whole universe. Infinity reduced to a journey.

This is dangerous, Martin knows, and he is hurtling right into the arms of horrible and faceless men, in uniform, with guns; all the crueler with the power of a million complicit citizens who would rather brush it under the rug than risk the firing line. What was the alternative, though? Hide, hope they didn’t connect him with their enemies, sunk into shadow and obscurity and the cushy taste of pillows and mediocrity and suburbia. 

Block his doors and windows and ears with cotton wool, to drown out Jon’s pleas. No, no, he couldn’t do that. He revolves around Jon, Jon running from the hospital with bare pink heels and bleeding shoulder blades.

Martin is burning in response or perhaps in solidarity with that pain. Martin is burning a path to him, burning through the world he once knew. He will let himself be destroyed for his angel. What choice does he have?

-

_It starts when…it starts when you keep on bleeding._

_On the first day, he screamed through the night. The bandages they put on him, the bandages they pressed like a second skin, and it was agony._

_By the second day, he realised that the loneliness was worse. He’d scream himself raw if he had to, but it made no difference, because nobody ever came._

_Those gentle hands on him, they weren’t evil, just cold. Clinical and cold. The faces of the nurses slid out of focus, and their eyes locked onto the ground whenever he tried to beg. Jon thought that maybe they didn’t want to be here, either. But all the sympathy in the world wouldn’t warm up their hands._

_He used to imagine the conversations he might have with them; that is, before he lost the capacity for imagination. Blink twice if you need help, he’d say._

_—What help can you give me? You’re the one in the hospital bed.  
—Two is better than one against…  
—Against who? Who are you even fighting?  
—Whoever hurt me. And you.  
—You’re the one in the hospital bed._

_Through the third and fourth days, he began to notice the changes. Not the changes of flesh; no, he’d already been changing. His body wasn’t done changing by any means and wouldn’t be done for some time. Rather, what changed was the sluggish movement of his muscles, and the way his thoughts traversed his brain like something was dragging them down, all pained._

_He stopped noticing things, too. He didn’t notice the new nurse, a student with a blonde little bob. He didn’t notice the waxing moon, and when he looked to the sky on that clear night, he realised he’d forgotten the constellations._

_Losing your memory never left an eraser shaped gap, white and gaping. It was more like the erosion of a shore. Jon felt like him, his whole being, everything he depended on for a coherent sense of self; his books, ideas, equations, his favourite song, brand of teabags, the patterns on birds he could identify, the shape of another hand in his; was a seaside town on a cliff. He’d lived his life with a defiant irony, building a town he knew would be destroyed. How disarmingly human. He just hadn’t expected the tsunami to come so soon._

_On the fifth day, he finds a rolled up piece of paper addressed to a familiar name. And everything comes into focus, once more._

-

Pitstops hurt. Whenever he takes his hands off the wheel, Martin feels his body shaking. There are ghosts inside of him, screaming verses of agony and abuse and cruelty that he’ll never be able to change.

He can ignore the voices if he’s driving. Something about pushing the speed limit with the motorway stretching to heaven; it pushes down the ugly feelings. He feels more real like this, with the hum of the engine travelling up his arms like a promise of destinations. Still, he stops at petrol stations and roadside cafes to piss and buy a ham sandwich and his body is dissolving and his heart is screaming. 

It’s like, having a body is a curse, but also the only solid thing in his life. The voices only torment him when he’s not moving. That should be manageable.

“Jon,” he whispers into the white noise of careless holidaymakers and truck drivers, into the teeth-numbing muzak they play in chain cafes, into the red Camaro’s radio. “JonJonJonJonJonJon.” Says it like Jon’s listening.

People look at him like he’d deranged, so he just pictures his destination in the moment he can hold Jon again. These people couldn’t understand what it means to have a destination, when all of the time in between, all of this time not touching him: it is purgatory. It is endured, not lived.

Martin doesn’t mind that he's driven a thousand miles without sleeping. He has only one left. It is still as unbearable as it always was. These numbers don’t mean anything; Martin doesn’t notice numbers anymore, nor does he notice when he brushes shoulders with people in the crowd or when eyes follow him through the shifting and terrible landscape of his purgatory.

“I’d like one chocolate milkshake and one strawberry milkshake,” he says as clearly as possible to the man in the drive-through McDonalds. There is a scrutiny in the way his eyes find Martin’s sweat-soaked skin.

Martin feels like a shadow on the surface of someone else’s planet. “What size, sir?”

“Large.”

“Anything else?”

“No.”

“That’ll be £3.98, sir.” Oh. That’s more expensive than he remembers.

The chocolate was for Jon and the strawberry was for him. It was a gesture of hope, so he kept driving.

-

_One day, Jon turns into an angel. And he doesn’t stop turning. And it is wonderful._

_The angel, which is probably still him or possibly not, recognises little of the new world. Maybe it’s the drugs they’re giving him but waking up in the morning feels like a tug of war. Jon’s new skin wants to feel the fresh air and flaunt itself to the world. The drugs they give him make him want to curl up inside the duvet, where nobody can ever see him ever again._

_The angel within but also without him, the infection that has settled into his bones, it sees the world as a series of colourful blurs and it KNOWS that there was meaning, there had once been meaning, but can’t quite touch it, like a word on the very tip of the tongue. Until it remembers, or until Jon collects enough of what he once was to read words._

_Here’s how he manages it._

_A better Jon; a smarter one, the one who was just as unsteady but more crystalised than this shaking creature; he’d left little clues._

_This Jon saw the angel growing inside of him, and knew it acted on instinct where he wavered. It liked dark rooms and loved the faces of passers by, the different ways their noses stuck up and then down, and most of all the angel within and without was as insatiably curious as Jon was before._

_So he knew that the scared creature would reach out in moments alone, trace the whitewash brickwork of his hospital room. Of his prison cell._

_(That’s what this place was. A prison, painted nice, with bars in their heads rather than the windows. They even took all his possessions, his clothes, that nice red jumper that Martin bought him for Christmas.)_

_He knew that the scared creature would find a loose brick, and begin to tug._

_(There’s one possession they didn’t find.)_

-

Martin used to pray about this moment. He’d roll down the window and beg the wind, beg it to carry a message to Jon.

Remember me, that’s all. I’m on my way, I promise, I’m getting you out of there.

And really, it was going to take a stroke of excellent luck to get Jon out of here. Any planning Martin had done, he’d done it on the road. Pulled in a few favours, asked around to find out government cars were heading south, finally catching a number plate and tracing it to a hospital in a town Martin had never heard of.

And on the way, so many hours passed, hours of tuning the radio, hours he would rather let disappear on the side of the road. The broadcasts were scrambled. Sometimes the people on the radio spoke only of the weather, for hours, nothing but showers and sunny spells in a town a hundred miles from here. Sometimes the people on the radio would say his name.

— _Martin_ , they’d say.  
—Martin he’s waiting. Martin he’s hurting and there’s reports of people, up and down the country, people whose wings grow so terribly and cut like knives through the flesh of anything or anyone in their way. —Martin they’re lying, he’d never hurt you.

Martin you’re in terrible danger, they said, but he kept on driving, because that’s who Martin is.

—Rain expected south of the river. Heavy rain on the high street. Rain clouds gathering over the hospital.

This is the moment of truth. He just hopes...hopes Jon is in a state to be rescued.

-

_Marin loops his Ls, and joins up all his letters until the words become one scribble. The tails of his Ys form a neat little swish at the end of his words. He dots his Is with circles. Jon could recognise it anywhere, through every distortion of his eyes and every trap the world had to offer._

_It’s a shopping list. They were thinking of moving in, before all this had happened, and Martin had stayed the night, and when he was called into work he left a little shopping list for Jon, signed off ‘Martin’ with a heart. He left him with a self-conscious, hopeful token of domesticity. And it might just be Jon’s salvation._

_The day he starts running, it is raining._

-

Martin can see the hospital.

-

_It is raining, and the window to his room is open. The scent of rain fills his feeble mortal lungs; petrichor, Martin had taught him the word. Dust after rain._

_He exhales, and the fractions of his soul come together in a moment of soaring harmony. He can see his hands, pockmarked, freshly scarred, small. He can smell the rain. He could recite Martin’s list, word for word, if he wants._

_He_ remembers.

-

Rain is forecast today; the first in a long summer. The season is breaking.

Martin had known it was coming. When the world started changing, shortly before Jon’s disappearance, he had turned on the radio and heard the first of many weather forecasts for a town Martin had not heard of.

It really was as simple as that. Martin didn’t know why it had to be complicated. To him, the world had always seemed awfully big, so when newspapers began to run articles about roads that stretched out forever, or cafes duplicating, or people disappearing, he didn’t think much of it.

He was only thankful that there was some sort of benevolence. Or some sort of meaning. There was chaos, but the world wanted him to find Jon, the universe was pointing in a direction and telling him to floor it. And so he did.

The day before Jon disappeared, the newspapers stopped reporting, and there was a black car at the bottom of their road. 

Martin regrets ever leaving Jon’s pokey flat. The last thing he’d done was leave Jon a note; it was supposed to be helpful, a reminder to pick up some food for dinner, and Martin had written it pretending they lived together and shared groceries all the time and took it in turns cooking. It was domestic. That note was a promise of everything they could’ve been.

He always intended to make good on that promise, even when his neighbours tried to placate him with cups of tea and slices of sponge cake and reassurances that ‘reporting it, that’s all you can do, just leave it to the authorities to sort out, my dear, no use worrying yourself,’

And he’s made it; against all odds, here he is.

-

_The angel within and without him has no words for this kind of feeling; that feeling of elation where you want to stick your head out of the window and scream in a good way. It only has actions. Those actions are to pull out the IV drip, kick off the sheets, and run._

_Jon’s feet are bare, and all he wears is a hospital gown, but for an everlasting moment he feels no cold. The hospital ward is a small and lifeless place, with figures drifting the hallways, unseeing. Jon can’t tell if they are medical staff or patients, and his heart breaks for them. But if they were to ever have a chance, he has to get out of here._

_These bare feet carry him well, whatever he is now. The best thing is, he feels different to the self that he had woken up as this morning; the glory of becoming something totally new. In the back of his brain, he wonders if this place has security guards._

-

The place they’d been holding him has a pair of security guards at the door, and Martin’s brain is moving a hundred miles per hour—faster, _racing_ —when their heavy-duty radios crackle and they take off in the opposite direction.

For a moment, Martin is stunned, but then he thinks of Jon and everything else is eclipsed.

It is a hospital but not quite, with concrete walls and imposing size rising above the rest of the street. He’d looked at it on Google Maps, but—nothing really prepares you for the concrete reality.

It’s a horrible place; it’s the kind you let your eyes slide past, the kind you pray nothing’s going on inside. Or, rather, normal things are going on inside. Just a hospital, just broken arms and car accidents. Not—

-

_Nobody tries to stop him._

_He runs through the double doors and feels the cold, suddenly and all at once. The sun is behind clouds but brighter than he remembers. His getaway car has one wheel on the kerb and there, at the wheel, there, eyes finding him—_

-

There, bedraggled on the pavement—

-

_“Martin,” he says, like it’s the only word, just as he throws open the passenger door and cries—_

-

Jon. Jon. He’s finally here.

-

_For a long time, the only word Jon remembers is Martin’s name. He’s losing a lot of blood, he realises absently, because apparently that is a certain risk factor in ripping out I.V. drips. This does not matter to the theatricality of his angel self._

_Beneath the bandages still covering his chest and back, he is itching. It is unbearable; he can’t even focus on Martin’s face._

_“W—w…Martin?” Martin is flooring it; he has two hands on the wheel and two eyes on the road. Jon’s lips are clumsy around his words, around sounds that taste wrong._

_Words don’t begin to describe it._

-

Finally, he is—

He’s here. He’s more than here, he was running towards him like a vision and now he’s here.

Martin wants to scream it to the world. Finally finally finally. He is…

He is finally sitting in that passenger seat, and Martin shakes his head a little to check he’s not a mirage. His purgatory, the journey that brought him here, it is forgotten in an instant. 

Jon is sitting there, glowing. There is something otherworldly in Jon’s centre, and for the first time, Martin realises it has always been there. That potential to be divine; he’d seen it inside Jon a long time ago. He wasn’t like anybody else he’d ever met.

“Where did you get the car?” His voice is husky, vowels slurred from a lack of use. He is nursing his left wrist, which is bleeding profusely. Martin reaches into the glove box and hands him a roll of bandages, which he accepts with poorly hidden surprise.

“I stole it.”

“I didn’t even know you could drive,” said Jon, because of course that’s what he’d focus on. Martin doesn’t know how to act. This is the man and the moment he’s dreamed of; the dreams which pulled him out of a grey world. 

He’s different, he’s changed, he reminds himself. Don’t expect too much, Martin, you’ll only get hurt. But he doesn’t believe that Jon has changed much, really.

“Um, I got you this,” Martin says, and his eyes can’t even move from the road. He is so, so, so afraid. It rises up in his throat, tightening around his words, then sinks and settles into a painful and bottomless pit in his stomach, with all the grace of an enormous stone.

Jon understands what he’s talking about, regardless.

“I’m lactose intolerant,” he says, so quiet.

“I know. And you also hate fast food places. Particularly McDonalds. You tell me this all the time on nights out when we end up in the nearest 24-hour place, and you rant about international corporations and the environmental implications of cheap meat. All with bits of Big Mac in your mouth.”

Jon doesn’t laugh. “Did you pay with a card?”

Martin risks a look. Jon is frowning at the chocolate milkshake, studying it with eyes that are just a little bit too blank. “No. Don’t worry, can’t be traced. I withdrew all my money.”

“For me?” 

“You ask a lot of questions,” Martin says, and it’s a fond jab, but Jon looks crestfallen. 

“I’m trying to…to put the pieces together. That’s all.” No, there’s something else, Martin can tell. There is so much going on below the surface; always was; and he is starting to slowly notice the vast complexities in Jon’s mannerisms. He doesn’t push it. 

“Chocolate is my favourite,” Jon continues, and he says it with a firmness, like he’s trying to imprint the details of himself on the surface of the car. Pressing himself carefully so he’ll always remember that chocolate is his favourite and his name is Jonathan Sims.

Martin vows to always stay by his side. That way, he can remember all those details, so Jon doesn’t have to. Why should they worry about fading away? They are invincible when they are together.

Martin knows this is a lie. Because the safety they desperately see in each other will end the moment they are separated.

“Do you remember?” Martin says, with a gentleness like speaking to a child. “3AM with you. After a night out or something. We had to wait for the morning trains to come, so we’d find the closest 24 hour place and wait out the night, no sleeping, nothing. It was okay ‘cos we were together, and we’d just spend the night talking, talking and talking about anything that popped into our head. Then we’d buy a cup of tea each and watch the sun come up.”

Jon chuckles too harshly. It’s unsettling, but all Martin can think about is his broad smile. “Yeah. And then we’d get on the platform with all those early morning commuters in their suits looking like…looking like…”

“Matching messes. Absolute fucking disasters. Hair all over the place, eyebags…God, they judged us so much. The evil eyes they gave us,” and it’s Martin’s turn to laugh at the memory.

“And then we’d sleep on the train…”

“Your head on my shoulder, my head on your head. Yeah.”

In a desperate moment, Martin reaches out his hand, but Jon just scoffs at it and pulls him into a pressing hug. It’s unbelievably awkward; Martin still has one hand on the steering wheel, half-focused on making sure they don’t die, and Jon is moving his limbs like a newborn and he’s still hiding the space behind his back as his knees knock the gear shift.

But the feeling of Jon’s body against him; present, beating, alive; it is the best feeling Martin has ever experienced.

Martin swears they will be safe, safe from this point onwards. He won’t let anybody separate them again.

-

The journey has been swung on its axis, and Martin loves the new direction almost as much as he loves Jon. The reunions he had dreamed up were more emotional, more physical, more transcendent and cinematic and earth-shattering. 

But this change is so much better; it’s the real thing.

-

_Jon just wants the bandages off. It’s so distracting, this constraint, this forced skin, his vision blurs frantically. He can’t see, can’t see properly, can’t concentrate._

_He hasn’t met Martin’s eyes, not since he first caught sight of him while running from the hospital._

_What if Martin isn’t like how he remembers? What if he turns around and Martin is gone?_

_If only he could think clearly, it’s just, this itching—_

-

It’s early days, and they’re still caught up in the fumbling euphoria of each other’s body temperature, and they aren’t as discreet as they should be. They make stupid mistakes. It is the first 24 hours of their journey. Martin isn’t used to driving directionless; but he is used to driving, so he keeps the road ahead of them on muscle memory alone.

“Can we stop?” They’re driving through a village buried by patchwork fields. Jon’s voice is so desperate that Martin almost slams on the breaks then and there.

They find a park by the light of the moon and sit on the swings together.

“What did they do to you?” It’s the horrible question Martin has been wanting to ask for so long, but it escapes his mouth with surprising ease.

The swing creaks as Jon scuffs his bare feet on the tarmac. “Not much. Bound me up, injected stuff in me, made me, um. The injections were the worst. I promise it was-- it really was nothing much--”

“I’ll kill them.” Martin knows he is burning; if only to make up for how calm he seems in the moonlight. Jon never was good at lying; at least, not to Martin. “I’ll kill them all.”

Jon looks at him morosely. “Please don’t.”

Martin has never been so angry, in all his life. At the sign of escape, Jon was more alive than ever, but now he sits, subdued and washed out.

“How’s your arm?”

“Fine. Stopped bleeding. Been worse.”

“The bandages,” Martin says suddenly. There is a streetlamp behind them, and the neat rows of white are cast in a sickly orange glow. It makes Jon look beautiful; it makes his hospital garb look clinical and wrong.

“No, I—I’m just tired, that’s all. I need some rest.”

“The seat must be hurting you, it’s trapping your…do you actually have…?”

Jon digs a heel into the dirt to still the gentle back and forth of the swing. They are silent, and Martin savours this, studying his side profile as he looks at the ground.

Suddenly, Jon leaps up from the swing and runs, runs from the play equipment as fast as he can, his heels licking the dewy grass. He sprints and then falls to his knees, framed by the metal goals without nets, where the local children play football.

Martin imagines what he’ll say to him.

—Jon, sweet, angel.  
—It hurts. I wish I could fly away, but we can’t be seen. Even this is too dangerous. Freedom with a cost.  
—We’re flying in our own way, angel.  
—I just don’t want to lose you.  
—You won’t.

Jon is crying when he catches up, and Martin’s script turns to dust in his mouth. “Jon,” he says, which is his crutch word. The taste of Jon’s name is like a coping mechanism. He wonders if that’s a mutual thing.

“Martin.” From the amount Jon says his name, it’s likely. His voice is toneless, and it reminds Martin of when they first met, and Jon was such an arse. He suppresses a laugh.

The dew of the grass is like glitter over an unimpressive world. The early hours of this park hold the greatest moments of human experience in its careful palm; drunk teenagers, throwing up on their shoes. Shady characters, exploiting or dealing or maybe just wandering. Restless insomniacs, a drawn-up hoodie against the chill and the rest of the world. And now, them.

Martin lies on the wet ground beside Jon. They’re not safe here, but it feels like a fairytale. Jon eases himself down to lie on his stomach and they turn their faces at exactly the same time, so their noses are inches apart and their hot dragon breaths catch the moonlight and fan out over each other’s faces.

“You’re right. It does hurt.”

“Oh, really? And all this time, I thought you were lying weirdly for shits and giggles.”

“Do you want to see them?” It is spoken as a secret or a promise between the two of them under the infinite witness of the constellations.

Martin does not answer for a long time. “Don’t worry. I’m sorry if I pressured you into anything. Your body—it doesn’t matter to me, what’s important is that I’ve got you back, and that you’re you. You’re Jon. Okay?”

Jon just cries harder, and Martin reaches out a shaking, cold hand to wipe away the tears. Jon’s face is even colder, but the tears fall hot and like pearls.

“Does that mean you…don’t want to see them?” Jon only has to whisper. They are so close; they are almost one being.

Martin laughs, despite himself. “I want what you want? Okay? Darling?”

“I want…” His eyes are bright and quick and utterly bottomless. Martin wants to live inside of them. “I want. Yeah. It hurts. Can you help me…?”

The bandages are over and under his hospital gown, and Martin fights to slip a finger underneath. There is a writhing movement, and Jon hisses. Together, they ease themselves upright.

“Damn. My bum’s all wet, now.”

“Martin! The bandages, please.” But Martin is already working on them while Jon’s smile lights up a specific portion of his chest. It’s painful; he can see it written all over his face. But still he tries to smile whenever he lifts his eyes to meet Martin’s. He makes eye contact like it’s a fearless act.

The things growing out of Jon’s shoulders are thrumming with anticipation. It sends shock waves up Martin’s arms. Once the first layer falls free, Martin unties the string around the neck of the hospital gown. It is covered in splotches of old blood. Martin doesn’t want to know who the blood belongs to.

The second layer is so much tighter and twice as painful. There is so much. Martin is worrying in every possible way, thinking of people seeing them and wondering how to ease Jon’s pain and should he just leave the back of the gown open and—

“Martin, duck!” He obeys instinctively, a shot of adrenaline disorienting him as something huge and indistinct shoots past his head, ruffling his hair, and his vision is spinning until he can right himself and find Jon and…

Oh.

The moon is behind him, everything else in a carnivorous darkness except for—him. Illuminated from within and without. His silhouette burns into Martin’s eyelids; a fragile and familiar body haloed by wings.

And oh, those wings. Martin will be blinking their image for days. They dwarf Jon and yet seem as natural as his arms and legs. They thrum with energy, with power and fury and light, and Martin knows that this is who Jon was always meant to be. That—spouting wings, this transangelic epidemic, it’s just a realisation of all of the potential in the human body.

It’s beautiful.

He walks, and stretches his wings out rhythmically. He does not let them stretch to their full diameter, and yet they are still enormous.

Martin lets him walk up until the moment his fear rears his ugly head, and even then, he lets him walk just another few paces. Martin could watch him forever; wants to; but all in good time.

How could anyone think this is monstrous? It’s twisted and strange, but it’s a sight to behold. Jon always was a sight to behold.

-

_After Martin sees him—all of him, that is— Jon doesn’t speak for a long few days._

_He shivers until his muscles are worn out, and sleep comes reluctantly. He is scared that when he opens his eyes, Martin will be gone, will have ditched the car on the hard shoulder, doused it in petrol and set it alight. Jon knows he carries a lighter in his jean pocket, and now the angel knows that too, and the angel feels so horribly exposed._

_He hates you now, it says. He hates what you have become._

_But he keeps opening his eyes, and Martin keeps being there with an encouraging smile. By some miracle. Martin is the greatest miracle that could ever grace a monster like him._

_He does not dare to open his mouth and voice that. He cannot bear it. He is scared he has forgotten the words he once knew._

-

Even if Martin sees Jon’s soul as it is; unchanged, beautiful, shining; the rest of the world still don’t. The world they knew was transformed, and now they have no choice but to navigate it.

They’re sitting in a roadside cafe, with a pot of coffee between them, like a peace offering. It’s a poor imitation American diner, and it stinks of something lost. Jon still isn’t speaking. The radio in the kitchen is cranked up full volume as Jon is poking at his scrambled eggs. With a belated horror, Martin realises what the news reporter is talking about.

_…angels…afflictions…mysterious and unpredictable…possibly dangerous, should not be trusted…hospitalised immediately…treatment…transplant…amputation…_

Martin pulls the napkin towards him. Jon has Martin’s favourite big jacket draped over him, hiding his wings. Martin reaches over to the chest pocket, where he keeps his biros, and Jon’s eyes are on him with a quiet terror.

So, he’s listening too. Martin takes notes with a helpless hand. They can process this later, this is a problem they can deal with in the future, but every new word makes him smear the ink.

The shape that is forming from his scribbled words, it is something terrifying. To the normal people in this normal diner who drink coffee and ignore the chasmic terror of the outside world, they hear only reports of angel wings as a type of terrible violence. No wonder they look so afraid.

On the flashing sign, they advertise this place as a safe refuge. Refuge from the storm! Come you huddled masses, sit in this roadside diner for a while! Martin’s hands are shaking.

“I shouldn’t have brought you here. It’s dangerous.” Jon just regards him with those considering eyes. So brown, always warm and intelligent and focused. His small hand is on his chest; over the breast pocket Martin had touched moments before. It looks like he is trying to protect something.

He keeps transcribing. He keeps looking forward.

_...if an individual from your neighbourhood has gone regrettably missing, it is likely they are among the afflicted. It is unclear whether this is a conspiracy against organised society, what the intention is, and what the relationship this Transangelic Epidemic has to do with the seismic shifts in space/time._

_Top scientists theorise it is infectious, and urge you to keep to yourselves and stay in contact with the authorities._

_Only know, good citizens, that this affliction could befall even the most innocent-looking. Even your friends and your neighbours and your loved ones are at risk. Contact and collaborate with your neighbourhood watch team if you spot any unusual behaviour. Together we will neutralise the threat._

_The only way to stay safe is to stay vigilant. Remember, a good,_ normal _citizen would never tolerate…_

Forward, to his angel, who stands out far too much. Martin always thought Jon glowed like some otherworldly blessing, but back then they called that love, and now it means the bend and warp of reality itself. Just looking at him for a second turns the rest of the world grey and ashen.

A feather has somehow escaped his bandages and sits on the booth. He is beautiful. Martin is so, so angry that somebody could ever hurt him, that anyone could do anything but love him, and maybe that’s unhealthy. Obsessive. But what isn’t? And thank God he is plagued by love and not by—

Jon’s hand shoots out to hold his wrist. Loosely, but there is a power in his movements. They stay like that, connected across a table, just reaching and reaching and reaching. The eggs are cold and so is the coffee.

 _You should contact the authorities,_ the radio says. _The authorities,_ it repeats, _be sure to find a member of the authorities, should one of these creatures be sighted it is of utmost importance that the authorities are alerted—_

“Can I kiss you?” Martin says. Jon reaches over and kisses him first, and they kiss like kissing is breathing, and they run back to the car and floor it and do not pay their cheque.

Sometimes, when it is the dead of night and Martin’s heart feels its darkest, he imagines what would happen if they were ever caught.

-

_Jon finds talking is easier after that. Jon doesn’t want to get his hopes up, but it seems like Martin might still love him. Might love him regardless._

-

“Where to?” says Martin, like a taxi driver. The formality seems absurd; after all, it’s only Jon. Sometimes Martin forgets he has angel wings tucked behind his back.

“I don’t know. The open road? Away?” Jon has a nice awareness of clichés, Martin thinks. That’s one thing they have in common.

He presses the issue. “Away from what?”

“Them,” Jon says darkly.

“No, Jon. Away from what. What is chasing us? Who did this to you? Please. I want you to tell me everything you remember. From when they took you.”

“I thought you ‘wanted what I want.’”

“Jon, would you stop—” Martin takes a deep breath. “Okay. Can you remember anything? That you want to share?”

“I don’t care to think about it.”

Martin scoffs, allowing himself a glance at Jon’s firm mouth and uppity expression. “Don’t care to think about it? You don’t care to think about it? Well, I don’t care for leaving my entire life behind to bail you out, Jon, so if you could just get a little perspective.”

Martin is reeling. Jon’s eyes are downcast.

“I’m sorry, that was—”

“No, Martin, I’m sorry. I want to work through this together, and I shouldn’t be keeping you in the dark, I’m just trying…”

“To protect me, I know.” Martin lets out a little huff. “I chose this, okay? There’s no other way for me. I know I’m putting myself in danger, and I’d do it again in a heartbeat, for you, Jon…angel, so don’t fuss about protecting me.”

He has not called Jon ‘angel’ before. In different times, it would be a pet name. Now it means so much more.

“Because you’re a good person.”

“No, because I’m a selfish person who loves you unconditionally, and needs you, and won’t listen to what anybody else is saying.”

Jon’s laugh is like a sob.

In the silence, Jon finds a biro and begins to sketch on the back of a greasy napkin that Martin had stuffed in the cup holder, along with his notes of the radio broadcasts. The sound of the pen is dulled, ripping through the layers with a trembling urgency.

Jon used to love drawing. That was his thing, and words were Martin’s: he’d spend hours filling the margins of paper with complex doodles, a window into an labyrinthine fantasy world of monsters and steaming cups of tea and painstakingly elaborate cherry blossoms. Martin would rather describe than recreate.

Music was where they met in the middle. Martin remembers them, driving together with the stereo on, in better circumstances than these. Even then, Martin was at the steering wheel.

Jon would close his eyes.

—What are you doing?  
—Directing music videos in my head.  
—Cool.

The napkin he presents to Martin features his usual attention to detail. It is vivid and disturbing, the ink likeness of faceless men in uniform, armed to the teeth with weaponry. Jon might be exaggerating the weaponry. Martin hopes to God that Jon is exaggerating the weaponry.

“That’s them,” he says with a boyish triumph.

“No face.” Martin commits the horrible image to memory, knowing that it’ll visit him in the dead of the night when Jon is asleep. So smooth and wrong.

“Yeah.”

“Actually no face, or is that coming from your brain?”

Jon runs a hand up and down the fabric of his hospital gown. It gapes open at the back so his wings can breathe. “I don’t think it’s as simple as…either of those two things.”

Jon likes nuance. Martin does not.

-

The next time they stop so Marin can toss and turn and claim he slept, Jon’s hand shoots out and grips his wrist urgently.

“Something’s not right,” he says. Martin just steps back as he fumbles underneath the back of the car and his hands grip around a shape and tug.

It’s a tracking device.

In different circumstances, Martin might find a kinder explanation for the blinking, circular bit of machinery that’d been fixed hastily to their car. But not today. This…is bad.

He drives as fast and as erratically as he can for a stretch of time that can’t be quantified but feels like enough. Every car behind them feels like it might be the violent end to their journey. Jon’s eyes catch over all their faces. He’s checking they have features. That they’re real.

“That town...it was too small,” Martin says. “We attracted too much attention. We stood out too much. Or was it the diner?”

“I don’t know.” Jon is shutting down the issue, his eyes watching the road with a fear so desperate Martin can practically feel it push against him.

“Shit, Jon, this is my fault. I’m so sorry. I should never have taken us there-- I thought it was safe, it was quiet and everyone was minding their business, I…”

“I don’t know,” Jon repeats. “Please don’t blame yourself. We can’t have known, plus you’ve done nothing but look after me. It’s okay. It’ll be okay.”

There is a pause.

The footwell by Jon is filled with his fallen feathers and scraps of paper and the discarded packets of cereal bars. He speaks again. “Are you hungry, Martin?”

The rest of the feathers are in plastic bags in the backseat. Martin uses them as pillows. “No. Are you?”

“Yeah but like, in a weird way. My body is sending out a whole load of sensations right now.”

“How’s this for a sensation?” Martin asks, taking his eyes off the road long enough to peck Jon on the cheek. He likes to imagine he is blushing. “I’ll kiss you properly in a second.”

“This is serious. Stop being a distraction.” He’s definitely blushing, actually, Martin doesn’t even need to look. “Should we get some supplies in a city or something? At least a…large town? We can blend in better.”

“It’s dangerous. But okay, if you’re certain.”

They stop on the hard shoulder and Martin finds all the jumpers he packed so Jon can try to blend in. He packed a lot of jumpers. They’re important for car journeys, even though he hasn’t needed them as soon as Jon took the seat beside him. He warms up everything and thaws all the icy things inside of Martin. It’s like, in proximity to him, his own heart becomes as orange and glowing as Jon’s skin.

Jon has been wearing the hospital gown for most of the journey because it’s breathable and lets his wings stretch when they’re on the motorway. When he’s like this, Martin can only see feathers when he looks behind him. It’s kind of dangerous, but so is everything.

Jon just tells him to use the wing mirrors, then laughs and his feathers ripple. And Martin calls him a little shit. And he lights up.

Jon pulls a pair of jeans over the gown, and Martin kisses his jaw over and over until he’s batted away with a playful swipe. He offers a jumper.

“We’re going to need more than one.” He’s folding his wings up, as small as possible, back to the trees so nobody looks twice. Were there always trees on the side of this motorway? Martin helps him pull it over his head, and it looks painful, so he kisses him again and hopes it brings some comfort.

Three more jumpers are bulky enough to disguise the strange shapes and edges. As normal as possible. Martin still thinks he would stand out in a crowd; there is something so divine about the way his skin catches the light. They exchange a look.

“Let’s go.”

The next signposted city is big enough to have three train stations and a cathedral. The shop fronts are cardboard because nobody can afford to prop up a business long enough to stay put. It is a high street without an identity, just words that swap and swap until the people are dizzy and cannot quite remember where they are.

That knowledge appears in his head without any prompting. He does not want to think about it too much, so he thinks about the cathedral instead.

Having a cathedral is the category for a city; or, at least it used to be, it’s hard to remember the order in which time flows; which Martin thinks is so stupid because cathedrals seem so obsolete. He was never keen on all these outdated rules from a religion that meant nothing to him.

Jon had a bit more sympathy, or at least a passing interest, in history and Christianity. They decide to go in.

It’s big, and there’s candles lit, and it smells—

-

_It smells like forgotten memories. That glorious church smell, of dusty stone stirred around by the heat above individual candles. Old and big and sweet._

_Jon remembers being as bundled up as this by his grandmother, and takes the memory and holds it close to himself as proof that he still has control. Layers of clothing; it’s a defence. She’d have him in huge jumpers to hide his awkward edges, and nobody would fuss over him like they did with the other kids. His grandmother was Catholic and extremely angry about it, and he knew she believed in something else when she was young, but attending church was a stubborn sort of conformity she adopted to blend in with the English people._

_Their local church was majority immigrant and filled with languages that fell harmoniously on Jon’s curious ears. He loved the grandeur of stained glass windows and holy murals that rose above the dusty feet that filled the pews. They were all outsiders, one way or another. The huddled masses. Britannia colonised the world, then clutched her pearls when the world came searching for what they’d lost._

_There was a very nice Irish woman who taught him first about the Empire, when he’d have anxiety attacks and have to go to the backroom while his grandmother stared with steely eyes at the altar. The Irish woman was fiercely intelligent, and she described cruelty in terms a child could understand; and yet, all the time she was resigned to it. That was the thing Jon couldn’t understand back then. So, he decided to carry her anger on her behalf._

_She described cruelty like it was something that lived in the past. Jon now knows it doesn’t._

_Breathing in the stagnant air, Jon opens the rage he’s been carrying for her and for so many other people. He is glowing dangerously and his eyes are fixed on the altar._

_“Do you want to light a candle?” Martin asks. Jon hears, but the thing within and without him doesn’t. Jon is starting to realise that—maybe they’re not as separate as he hoped._

_“Jon. There’s a supermarket across the road. Can you come with me?”_

_Jon says nothing and continues to burn._

_“Okay. I’ll be…I’ll be two minutes. I’ll come straight back. Don’t move, don’t do anything stupid, promise?”_

_And Martin keeps his word, of course he does, but it is two minutes too long in a place they never were safe._

_Jon does not watch Martin leave. He is enthralled by this place, so unchanged, solid rock against the flood outside. There is an awe to buildings like these which last through plague and famine and war and the skeletons that nestle in its catacombs. If rocks could talk they would have stories to tell, the silent witness to chaos…_

_For the first time, it occurs to Jon that he might be a survivor of something terrible. The apocalypse, maybe; perhaps that’s what rages behind these ancient oak doors. He didn’t expect the end to be so slow. He certainly didn’t expect to be living through it._

_But is that not the promise of every religion? You shall live evermore. There’s just no guarantee you will live evermore as you are; drink the holy water and you might mutate._

_He is human and he is sad and he is angry._

_A woman has joined him at the altar. When did he get up and go to the altar? What moved his limbs? Oh God, he’s thinking, oh God oh—_

_The woman is dropping a bottle cap from Cameroon into the donation box. Jon doesn’t know why he knows that, and so he tries to know a little harder, and feels a connection shoot through a synapse that didn’t exist before and suddenly he Knows that bottle caps had become a localised currency after breweries started printing prizes, ranging from a beer to a sports car._

_The woman lights a candle and wishes for safety. Jon looks away, an animalistic fear coursing through his veins. It feels like...it feels like a fight or flight reaction, only the thing he is trying to run away from is himself._

_What if this is all his fault? Did he do something wrong? The pews spin and then come into focus, and they are filled with people praying (praying harder than they ever have in their lives), and they are seeking solace (because their loved ones keep disappearing and the town they thought they knew doesn’t look like it does on the map and all the train stations have gone and the men in sleek black cars at the end of the street don’t have faces and they’re scared they might be trapped here), solace in higher powers._

_What if he did something wrong, and that’s why he was taken away? And all of this is a mistake, because the government surely knows best, and running away with Martin is making it worse?_

_The woman beside him leans forward, unafraid of the rigidity of Jon’s powerful limbs. “You’re not safe here,” she says to him, and Jon hears although her lips are not moving. “You need to find your partner and leave.”_

_How does she know? Does she Know? Jon is churning with questions and doubts and painful, painful memories. He loves cathedrals. He hates churches. He hates his grandmother but does not blame her. He doesn’t hate himself all the time, but he does blame himself. A lifetime of mistakes, and he’s just making it worse, so selfish and so ignorant and—_

_“That him?” she says, and Jon does not need to turn in the direction she is pointing._

_Martin. He says it aloud in unison with the angel inside of him. Martin. It is the sweetest sound in all the languages that have graced these walls._

_“You need to go. Protect yourself, protect him.”_

_“What about all the people? Can’t I help them?”_

_“Help them by_ leaving,” _she says urgently. Jon just fixes his eyes on the flame, and wonders whether his skin is capable of burning anymore._

_“Who are you?” he demands, with all the fire he can muster within him. Beneath the layers and layers of jumpers, his wings are trembling in unison with his wavering voice._

_His head is suddenly flooded with sights and sensations that don’t belong to him, and he scrambles to interpret this as an answer. “Human!” the memories seem to say. “Which means I have a body which isn’t always the same, and every day I am hated and misunderstood by others. I quite like cathedrals and I don’t like other people much. I remember being told a story in the entryway of my mosque, all about past lives and good and evil and running away into the forest. I think you’ll like the sound of it. It’s beautiful.”_

_Truly, Jon cannot escape the sound of it. The most consuming part of it is, it sounds so achingly familiar; a folk tale that he’ll memorise and retell to Martin when they’re driving away from this place._

_Martin. Where is he? Is he in danger?_

_No. No, he’s okay, for now. Jon can see him in his peripheral vision, making a beeline towards him, walking up the altar with groaning bags of shopping, and it is a strange imitation of the wedding they’ll never have. Maybe it’s not too late._

_“He’s not safe,” the woman says. The words sink into him like a stone, heavy with the Knowing; she’s right, she’s right, Martin is in danger and it’s because of him. Martin is calling for him, he realises absently, but he’s too scared to turn around because looking would make it real. He is so, so scared._

_The pews are empty now. That is the first sign._

_The woman tries the door to the toilets, but it’s locked. They are the only three people in there. Jon Knows they have covered all the exits, of course they would, they think ahead, evacuate the bystanders and corner them and it is_ all his fault. __

_“Hello?” he calls out, hoping they’re listening. They’re always listening. Perhaps they have powers too, the faceless ones. They seem to melt into the shadows and move more quickly, with movements that are mechanical and twisted and painful._

_“Hello? I’ll give myself up. I’m willing to come with you, on the condition that you let these two people go.” His wings are cowed behind his back, and he focuses determinedly on the Virgin Mary to the left of the altar. The candlelight dances across her face, every feature carved so lovingly._

_Jon has to focus on her, rather than the shadows emerging from concealed corners. He is finding it hard to discern between his own imagination and the physical reality of a confusing world; but maybe that is the place the faceless men in uniform deal best, in the fear which muddles people’s vision._

_“Jon!” It’s working. He is so very afraid, but this is for the best. They will take him again, they’ll take away his memories and make him fear the angel he was just starting to accept as part of himself. It tears you in two pieces, but maybe the forgetting will make it easier to bear._

_He just wants one more look at Martin’s face._

_And so he drinks it in, and he is so beautiful that Jon feels like he’s aflame, and his feathers are cascading. He pushed down the memories, pushed down the love because he was scared of losing it. But..._

_Martin is everything. He is every wonderful thing Jon could see reflected in his eyes. Jon revolves around him; to Jon, Martin is the sun of his very own solar system. And when he is in his arms, Jon buries his nose in and breathes, deep, and it smells like churches and books but better because he is so warm._

_He inspires this incredible reverence in Jon, through their tiny and private rituals; the way he methodically dunks teabags and then threw them in the sink (or sometimes at Jon’s head), the way he never dog-ears books, and has a cute little bookmark collection on his bedside table, the way he brushes his hair and messes it up again two seconds later, the way he laughs like fizzy drinks_

_And when Jon would stay the night in his little flat, and they’d lie side by side in the hot, sweet night and slowly gravitate together, hands breaching the space between them, Martin’s hair, Martin’s sweaty T shirts, Martin’s prickly thighs and soft belly, the parts of themselves nobody else saw. It felt like enough happiness to last Jon through eternity._

_Jon would listen again to all the love songs and poetry that spoke of a feeling bigger than the whole universe, and he suddenly thought, oh. This is what they were talking about._

_He wants to hold all this love in his hands and brandish it to the sky and say, “see? This is what makes me human!” But even when he grew wings that love didn’t change for a second. So maybe…_

_They deal in fear. Jon has a great antidote to fear. He’s always had it, bookish child he was, but now he’s discovering the true bounds of knowledge._

_Out of the shadows emerge uniformed figures, and so he looks each new figure in the face. Looks at them. Takes the time to see them and confront them even as their cold hands press on him, and with his eyes they falter, and amongst the hand a warm and familiar one is finding his, and he is dragged away and they cannot hold him, as he seeks to Know the faces they once had and now they are the ones who are afraid._

_They were going to take him willingly, but he’s been kicking and screaming all his life, so he’s not about to change that now. He knows his name and he knows his history, and God, what a feeling, and the buoyancy of Knowing spreads his wings to their full diameter. Huge and glowing and visible. And, most importantly, he knows he isn’t alone. Never has been, never will be._

_Because Martin’s hand is squeezing his._

_Feathers fall like confetti, and the eyes of the woman by the altar, bright and unquiet brown, find his. “I can handle this,” she assures him across the distance of the room. Jon Knows she’s telling the truth._

_As they run, their feet seem to not reach the ground. A tin rolls from Martin’s shopping bag, landing in the carpet of feathers that fills the church. In the commotion, a tealight falls and the feathers catch. They do not have time to watch it burn._

-

“I’m sorry about your jumpers,” Jon says, when they are in the car and breathing normally again. Well, as normally as possible. Martin thinks he will never breathe normally again.

“It’s okay. I have a lot,” Martin replies. Jon is peeling them off at awkward angles. “And a sewing kit, so. What…what happened back there?”

“Couldn’t say.” Jon is very deeply shaken, Martin can tell. But Martin witnessed it, that immortal moment when he was more powerful than the faceless people who would want to bandage him until he whimpers into nothing. It’s awe-inspiring.

He also saw that moment of doubt. It may be foolish, but Martin is determined to protect Jon from that _ever_ happening again. As long as they’re holding hands, Martin tells himself.

He knows Jon isn’t ready to understand the vastness of his power yet, so instead Martin imagines what he will say to Jon, soon enough.

—You’re powerful. That’s why they’re chasing us.  
—If I’m powerful, then how come they caught me once before? We can’t risk that again.  
—But we did risk it and it worked out. The risk…it meant that…what happened to that woman?  
—We helped her. Us.

As if reading his mind, Jon says: “I think I got her statement.”

“Who was he?” Martin says tentatively.

“You know, I...I think she was like us.”

“What are we, Jon?”

Martin glances over to Jon’s face. He is not frowning, but he is searching for a true answer to Martin’s question. A word to sum up all they know so far.

“We’re...important. That’s it.”

-

_Starts…with two identical pains just underneath his shoulder blades…_

_Jon’s mother is dead, but once, she would glide a knuckle over his knobbly shoulder blades, smile at him and get lipstick on his forehead. “That’s where your angel wings once were,” she’d say, “back when you were an angel.” She told him that all humans were supposed to be angels, and that one day, they’ll grow their wings again and fly back to heaven. Jon wants to know why she’d grown her wings and flown off without him. Why he can’t join her._

_Then he looks over at the man using his coat for a blanket in the back seat of the car, twisted so, when his eyes blink open, they fill with stars. And Jon thinks, that’s why. That’s why._

_“What do you remember about your childhood?” Martin asks, in the voice that means he wants to talk; really talk, until their voices go scratchy. So, Jon lets the darkness outside swallow him, just for a second, so he can think._

_“Little things. Stupid things. I wasn’t good at much, and I wasn’t good for much. I remember school, and being called names, and the faces of people I liked. What about you?”_

_Martin considers this. “It’s all feelings, isn’t it? I keep chasing the words, you know, the poetry that’ll express exactly what it felt like and what it means to me. Bit of a doomed quest.” Just like this quest, Jon thinks._

_“You can always try, though,” Jon says with more hope than he feels. He tries to find the tone of unrelenting optimism that his mother had, tries to pick at the memory like a loose thread. She was always so hopeful. But Jon doesn’t remember how that feels._

_He wants to ask her why his wings had come too soon and why he was wrong all over._

_Martin hums, tracing the steering wheel with an open palm, like soothing a wild animal. He’s not looking at Jon’s mournful face, and Jon has never been so thankful. Martin deserves better than this._

_“I remember the caravan we lived in and the feel of the trailer park at night,” Martin says. “It was a dump, but it breathed, you know. Felt kind of magical at night with the stars and the lights, orange and buzzing. I would watch the moths and pretend they were fairies.”_

_“Head in the clouds?” Jon loves him so much._

_“Oh yeah. You’d have hated me.” His smile is so small and so sad that Jon wants to grab him, let them veer off the road, and kiss him until it burns away the sadness. “Dreaming of floating away on the heavier breezes.”_

_“Catching the first bus to the city.”_

_“Packing a bag and your piggy bank.”_

_“Hiding in train toilets from the ticket inspector.”_

_“Stealing cars.” They laugh at that, a laugh that bridges self-parody and incredulity. They’ve made it. Both of them brave enough to make their daydream selves proud._

_Jon loves him, loves him, loves him like this with his beautiful words. He watches the streetlamps bob along on his face like lanterns in the water._

_He used to think humans were inherently lonely, that it was the curse of the body to never be truly understood. He thought that he was locked in his own brain while his poor, cursed human soul cried out between the gap that could never truly be breached._

_He’s not human anymore. He doesn’t think he’s doomed anymore; not that specific type of doom, but fate still nips at the heels of humans and heroes alike. But, in whatever time they could steal, hurtling towards the horizon, Martin is enough. He will always be enough to keep him reaching and chasing and learning for whatever the rest of his life meant._

_And what did numbers matter, anyway?_

-

—Broadcasting out to those lonely travellers on the road. For the rebels and the misfits. This song was written for you.

It is nighttime, and Martin starts fiddling with the radio when he stumbles across it again. It’s the station that led him to Jon, all that time ago. He’d forgotten.

He’d completely forgotten, and he’s kicking himself about it, because it’s the closest thing they’d got to an ally on this endless road. It makes no sense, and seems as cosmically terrifying as the rest of this...semi-apocalypse, with it’s transangelic epidemics and faceless men in uniform; but it seems like they’re actually trying to help.

—Sending out airways to help you navigate this changing world, folks. Just remember, angels, keep two hands on the wheel and the rising smoke just behind you is a surefire sign to wait a bit before your next pitstop!

Martin checks his mirrors, knuckles white. He is not surprised to see the pillar of smoke.

“You hear that?” he ventures. Jon’s eyes have been open for a while now.

“They know things that they shouldn’t.” Jon’s voice is scratchy from sleep and endlessly enduring.

“Well, so do you,” Martin says. Jon is silent, so Martin tries another approach.

“Who are these...these faceless men in uniform? It’s okay if you don’t know the answer. I’m just spitballing. I just...I don’t understand, and it’s so hard to know what to do when you don’t understand what’s chasing you or what you’re up against.”

You can know anybody’s face, you can know the woman serving you coffee and the man at the drive-through McDonalds. You can recognise the children in the supermarket and the people filling their cars with petrol and the tourists in the city. An infinity exists on other people’s faces, the promise of a background and a story.

But if the men in uniform really have families, then how come they are faceless? If they really are good, respectable, human citizens, then how come they inflict such pain?

Martin has a basic understanding of politics. The House of Lords was a nod to a long-dead feudal system. The House of Commons was an echo chamber, the Prime Minister a puppet, all designed to squabble loud enough to drown out the real issues beneath the surface.

An illusion of choice. Tactical voting and centrist parties. Martin always voted, because it was a right he would not be denied; but everyone else voted, too, as a nameless and faceless force that propped up that tiered and bloodthirsty system.

—This one is for the music makers and the music lovers. Keep your hearts and engines running hot.

Jon is watching him keenly, and Martin feels so very exposed by that look, as he always does when he is wrapped up inside himself and a look from the one who loves him takes him apart instantly because Jon just knows him so well, it is like they are inside each other’s heads. Martin pointedly looks at the stars. How much of that does Jon hear, does Jon understand without the need for language?

“They helped me find you. Even, like, the security guards, they turned tail when I pulled up and it was something to do with their radios. Could that be the same? I don’t know how, but. It’s hope, isn’t it? We know that there are others out there and that they’re powerful, too. Remember the lady in the church.”

“It’s a cathedral,” Jon says, because he’s pedantic. “It’s nice to know there’s someone whose...not trying to kill us, I guess.”

Jon agrees with him, that the faceless men in uniform have existed in some form or another. This form seems to be rather more literal, and rather more terrifying and drastic and cruel, than ever before.

Martin considers that Jon, too, exists in a more distinctive way. Martin had always thought that the uniform men had no faces and had always thought that Jon was an angel.

They were supposed to let the faceless men in uniform do their job for the greater good, and continue to ignore the missing persons posters that plastered the bus stops and magazine. Vanished faces, marked with some invisible black spot.

He hadn’t noticed the change in him begin. The system relied on it, that foolish assumption that it could never be you, it was them. But, when he wasn’t looking, the two of them had become the faces on the wall. The missing.

Could they scrub them off and cover it up, this time? The sudden mutation of thousands of bodies, like diamonds in horrible caves. If they weren’t the only ones; surely, if there was a story like theirs for every face on the wall, surely the force of all that love and hope would push against the lid.

Martin hates the world he knew, which was made of paper mache. Martin loves the hole that Jon is burning through it. Symmetry like that can only be written in the stars.

-

_Jon sleeps most peacefully in the early hours of the morning._

_His grandmother used to call him a good traveller. When she said good, she tended to mean obedient; but it was true, he never fussed her for travel sweets or fidgeted with his seatbelt or asked if they were nearly there yet. Jon made staring out of the window a skill. He’d just lock himself inside his brain for a few hours, where it was safest._

_And he slept with his cheek pressed up against the window. Only now, his cheek was burning and his once-safe brain was springing a leak and the chill of the glass he touched felt like an agony. It had started like that. The burning. All the way back in November—how long ago was that? What month was it now? –Back when he’d get caught in rainstorms and the droplets would hiss as soon as they touched his bare skin._

_God, so much had changed. Could he have done it differently? Noticed it earlier?_

_Now, he uses a backpack against the window, wrapping it in Martin’s jumper to make a pillow that smells like home. The vibrations of the car rock him to sleep, and he thinks that this is enough._

-

Eventually, Martin stops pretending to sleep.

Jon mentioned it precisely once, and Martin reacted so badly that he doesn’t breach the subject again, aside from those intense stares when Jon himself wakes from his slumber. Martin couldn’t complain. He looks like a disgruntled baby bird, glaring at him with sleep-crusted eyes. It’s adorable.

Truthfully, Martin doesn’t want to sleep. He woke up, somewhere past a roadside stall that looked identical to the past three pitstops, and he just—didn’t need to, anymore. He is so enchanted by the stars and the night sky and the sleeping man that to close his eyes would be a waste. 

This was even _before_ Jon, back when he was driving alone. One day, he just…knew he didn’t need sleep anymore, knew he could keep on driving until they—well, until something changes. Until they crash and burn or until they finally outrun the sunset.

This development is inherently monstrous. Not enough of a black spot for them to take him away; although carting an angel across the country probably counts as aiding and abetting; but it makes him feel some solidarity. It’s okay, he always felt like a bit of a monster.

The only issue is all of the time that is suddenly on his hands. The long nights, driving with his sleeping angel behind him, always take him towards his past that seems graven in the stars. It is inescapable.

-

Martin can steer with just one hand.

He reaches out the other one, and Jon holds it to his mouth, and he rests his lips there until he could almost swear they are engrained.

You don’t have to destroy yourself for me, he mouths.

He’s not. He was always like this; hopeless romantic, desperate lover.

-

_Jon does not think he is a monster._

_He reasons that this doesn’t prove much, seeing as monsters do not tend to identify themselves as monsters, and are in fact the heroes of their own stories. But monsters are evil and Jon Knows he is not._

_All he is, is a little bit deformed, and his soul is harmoniously parallel to Martin’s; a little bruised up, but hopeful nonetheless._

_And there's...knowledge that does not belong to him and power to break through crowds of people, all of which feels less like a mutation and more like an ability. But this is a new world, and if his mind works in stranger ways than the average human, he is disinclined to call that power. More an appropriate adjustment, like wings that help him fly across this shifting country._

_His wings have grown stronger and so has the little bloom of hope in his chest. It started with the cathedral and the woman and her story about running away to the forest._

_People don’t see him as a monster. They look at him like he’s divine. He’s a symbol to them really, it’s just difficult to tell what he is a symbol of. Being divine doesn’t necessarily mean being good; just distilled, just pure. Divinity is a moment rather than a messy thing, and he’s as messy as any human._

_He’s glad he can be that moment to the eyewitnesses, though. To some, he is a distillation of hope and revolution and change; to others, a creature of evil and malice and abnormality. It’s all perspective, probably. People can twist moments to mean whatever they want._

_Really, he’s powerless. He doesn’t do anything, he just lets other people interpret his enormous angel wings. He sure as hell doesn’t feel divine._

_Of course, Martin looks at him like he’s divine. But Martin always did._

-

Finding whoever is at the other end of the radio transmissions, that feels like the purpose. Days and days of listening has inspired a certain faith; even if they turn out to be malicious, even if every branch of omniscient power was out to make it their own personal apocalypse, the point is, it was a _good idea._

A way to test Jon’s powers, a way to help people. Something _tangible._ Neither of them know much about technology, but they keep finding abandoned cars and occasional hardware stores. Jon is learning to make a radio feed. Join that pirate radio. Freedom of information, to fight the propaganda telling scared people that their neighbours are evil.

There might be other ways of helping, though. Because, as Jon said, they’re _important_ ; making a difference is about figuring out who they’re important _to._

It’s a sunny day, and they stop off at a supermarket and have a close call with a security guard with red eyes and too many teeth and Jon is barrelling into the passenger seat, his mind urgent and running a mile a minute. Martin finds the panic in his brain and smooths it over without words. It’s always a false alarm, see, I can see their face, we’ve lost them, and we’ve found better things.

“I got a...a story. A statement. This little girl, she saw me, and I have—”

“Okay. Shall we listen to it together?”

Having an experience pressed onto you, filling your brain with knowledge that is not your own; Martin is sure it is the strangest experience. With Jon’s help, he can hear stories in their purest form. Jon’s memories seem to harmonise with his own—this child’s mind clashes, not unpleasantly, because it is so full of crayon colours and overwhelming movement.

“There is a child in the supermarket who sees something she never was meant to.

It is an angel browsing the different brands of orange juice, an angel who turns with gentle surprise, and whose beautiful wings are bigger than the hospital aisles. The child is scared by a lot of things, but not by this.

When the moment breaks, she goes home and takes her careful crayons, and draws the angel she saw. She wants to remember it forever; and she does, whenever she is afraid.”

Jon offers this information in his outstretched palm, and in their mind’s eye, they see the image as it is formed by her hopeful hands. Martin smiles, because it is Jon as he always sees him; a flattering portrait of your lover that reminds you of all the reasons they are beautiful.

(To Jon, it is like a punch in the gut. He never knew he looked like that, nor that he could have so much influence by a chance encounter.

And yet, he recognises the mismatched colours. It’s him. Not fragments of feathers and monsters and angels and knobbly bits of human flesh stitched up in some horrible shape; it’s Jonathan Sims as he always was.

He feels so good.)

-

_The point of an angel is that it inspires._

_What is an angel? What is a human? It is not clear. The only answer Jon has is…_

_It is the way he feels when he is with Martin and the night is clear and they are the only two people in the whole world. It is the feeling of watching the stars and the slow turn of the globe that existed long before his wings grew in._

_It’s love, he thinks. Hope and freedom and defiance, but mostly love._

_Humans dreamed up servants of the Lord to really be servants to them: omens and guardians. That word. Guardian. Jon thinks he was dreamed up to be Martin’s guardian. Martin doesn’t think he was dreamed up at all._

_Martin holds his hand and presses the sensation of being alive into Jon’s mind. They both still have heartbeats, which is important._

-

They visit the seaside, at one point.

When they retell it—the numerous ways they retell it, to strangers in the future, to their car radio in the present—Martin places it sometime after he stopped sleeping and before he learnt to untangle his thoughts from Jon’s. They share a lot, and Martin will learn how to distinguish the voices in his head sometime in the future, at least.

Jon disagrees, claiming he’s already learnt how to do that. Martin thinks he’s a pompous arse.

They pass through three empty towns before allowing themselves the luxury of loitering, where people are unlikely to find them. It is grey, and the pebbles make lovely sounds underneath their shoes. Well, Martin’s shoes. Jon doesn’t like shoes, but he agrees that the sound is lovely and picks up a particularly smooth stone that reminds him of Martin’s eyes. For a disorienting moment, Martin sees his eyes from Jon’s perspective. It’s oddly beautiful.

When they tire of walking along the shore, they find a nice area to sit and plonk themselves down at exactly the same time. Jon stretches his wings, and Martin settles himself into the crook of them. Jon is shielding him from the salt spray. He still tastes it on his lips and decides to share.

The ocean is so beautiful, even when the gloomy sky sucks the colour from it. The sea is the closest Martin has ever come to having a religion. He didn’t see it often, but remembers what it felt like to trail his hand through the water, and dodge the spray that licks at his ankles. He was never fast enough to escape it. He didn’t mind climbing back into the car with sopping wet jeans and the brightest smile.

The first poems he wrote were about the sea. He imagines still that she is a she, the first goddess who once ruled earth, and whose conquest continues in every wave that batters the shoreline. She is brave to keep going, Martin thinks. He hopes one day she will claim her land back.

Jon presses his own memories of the sea into Martin’s consciousness. They are more frequent and less special, so Martin laces them with the sacredness of his first poems, and it’s beautiful. Jon’s memories are much sharper now. There is a defiance in knowing exactly who you are and where you came from.

It is comforting, their minds say, to look towards the sea’s horizon. Meeting the ocean feels like the edge of the world; but really, it isn’t, and past all the fog and blur of sea air, there is another shore, another piece of land that survives against all odds. Isn’t that lovely?

They take off their shoes and trousers and run into the freezing cold sea, then they run back, shivering and laughing, and Jon’s wings have enough warmth for the two of them. They might’ve stayed on that beach forever. Martin watches Jon splash water and squint through the stinging air. Martin has those expressions of joy memorised, committed to heart like his favourite verses of poetry, if only because he is so glad Jon has the same face as he always has.

Are they monsters? They don’t have an answer to that. They know for certain there are monsters somewhere in this new world; people who lost their faces. But how is that different to the cruel things that already exist? They try and erase us, but we can’t be defined by absence.

If it is monstrous to paddle in the ocean, and sing along to the car radio, and share threadbare jumpers, and kiss all the time, and dance clumsily, and fill pockets with the prettiest stones, and share the sunrise like it can be consumed by hearts big enough—then, okay. That’s a fate they will accept. This is their story, and it’s improvised, and it’s still going, and it does not stay between the lines…

“Can I give you my statement?” Martin says, out loud. “I just…like to speak, sometimes, even if we don’t need to.”

Jon hands him a pebble, which means ‘Well, you would’ in a fond tone.

“How did he know Jon wasn’t like other people? Well, how does anyone know they’ve met their angel? Martin is a hopeless romantic. He writes sonnets about every kiss he’s ever shared, even every time another person has held his hand. He doesn’t have many kisses to write about. This human contact, it is so precious to him. He traces it deep in the night.

When he met Jon, he ran to the toilet, opened the notes section of his phone, and listed every beautiful thing about the way his eyes look from left to right and the way his hair sits, swept by anxious hands to point upwards. Martin was happy to be a placeholder, an observer for others.

But the more he got to know Jon, the more he started to find his own place in the narrative. Jon was dismissive, sure, and he hurt Martin’s feelings by falling short of the daydreams. But, in meetings and socialisation, while others were content to push him to the side-lines, Jon listened. He cared about what Martin had to say. He’d contradict it and pull it to pieces but around Jon, Martin had a voice.

Outside of the workplace, it took one impulsive night out for them to become friends. They had wildly different interests, but enough crossover and enough stubborn enthusiasm to carry on arguing all the way home. And Martin texted Jon the next day with a kind word for his hangover, and they laughed at their tired voices from all that talking.

And that’s really when Jon came to life, beyond the daydream. Martin loved him, he realised, within a year of knowing him, after he ran across the street to help an old man who didn’t speak a word of English drag a crate of oranges down the road. 

His words were good, but his actions were better. And soon he was catching Martin as they fell, and they were kissing in an empty art gallery, and Martin was itching to write sonnets not about the ONE beautiful man but about the TWO of them. How two pairs of lips felt like the end of the world.

They made each other better. Martin understood that, and he’d always thought Jon as otherworldly, as too good for this world. But it wasn’t until he was driving along an impossibly long road in a world that didn’t belong to them anymore, that he realised:

Jon was his guardian angel, only because he was Jon’s guardian right back. They shared something golden in their bloodstream. It was a promise. I’ll be your guardian if you’ll be mine.”

It is a lovely promise.

-

“Another statement, Martin. They’re saying this, right now. To somebody that they love. Somebody like you.”

“Is it wrong to want to hear?”

“I don’t think we could stop ourselves, darling.” Jon breathes and lets himself embody the stories of others. Martin only just noticed that his mouth was not moving.

“I once saw an angel. Small and bright, burning bright, against the hurried watercolour of my life. The angel did not see me, but danced, to music only angels can hear. So beautiful and horrible but their eyes were…their eyes were human.  
And I saw the man who travelled with the angel. The angel’s lover. He saw me, and smiled, the kind of smile you get from a stranger that makes you think, ‘what secret stories do you have?’, but never dare to ask.  
I have a few guesses at what the story might be, though. Change, and breathlessness, and fear, and hope. An angel, the angel’s lover. A tale as old as time. And before I knew it, I had two hands on the steering wheel, and I was driving to the hospital. To you. I beheld angels, and suddenly this was…being here, finding you. It was an inevitability.”

Jon and Martin let go of the words at the same time, to let the beginning unfold as it pleased, as unwitnessed. To let their faces become the decoration of missing peoples posters. It feels so good to be missing, but even better to be found.

Martin has found it. His faith, in an angel. This is the faith that there is something good out there in the cruel fucking world, and it is sitting beside him in the passenger seat of a red Camaro.

-

One day, an angel and a monster ran away. Rumour has it, they are still running; not out of fear, but love. Love of each other and the open road.

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you so much for reading!!!! I hope you enjoyed it as much as I did.
> 
> Another thank you and reminder to check out my beta reader, lapinoutt, and artist, on twitter [@blueskiddoodle](https://twitter.com/blueskiddoodle?s=20) and tumblr [@divineatrophy](https://divineatrophy.tumblr.com). Thank you guys so much for being amazing!!
> 
> If you still can't get enough of that sweeeeet Rusty Quill fanfic, check out the RQBB collection. There's some gems on there already-- and the good news is there's more yet to come!!! (or you could check out my ongoing university au)
> 
> Kudos and comments are my bread and butter. Thank you a million for checking this out <3


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